GLR July-August 2024

Burton and Nichols met while drinking at Sardi’s. Soon Nichols was a regular at Bur ton’s nightly parties after the show. When Burton flew off to Rome to shoot Cleopa tra and his affair with Taylor made world wide headlines, he invited Nichols to pay them a visit. He asked Nichols to show Elizabeth around the Eternal City incognito

professional relationship with his producer Ernest Lehman was at the center of the makingof Virginia Woolf . Was there some sort of repressed sexual dynamic at work there? Nichols had never directed a movie. He had transitioned from writing and per forming to directing comedies on Broad way, winning a Tony for Neil Simon’s

COCKTAILS WITH GEORGE ANDMARTHA

Movies, Marriage, and the Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Philip Ge ft er Bloomsbury. 346 pages, $32.

Barefoot in the Park. He was establishing a reputation as a bril liant stage director. When the movie version of Virginia Woolf loomed on the horizon, Nichols was excited but anxious. Lehman’s ideas for translating Albee to the screen did not match his own. Lehman wanted to turn the imaginary child into an adolescent of eighteen who committed suicide. Nichols al ways understood the child to be a symbolic element, express ing the core love between George and Martha. Nichols made his reservations clear to Lehman before he accepted the direct ing gig. This sealed the deal, and Lehman sent the Burtons— by now married—a telegram: “Hallelujah. We’ve got Mike. Happy Holidays.” § T HE PRECEDING DISCUSSION covers about the first third of Gefter’s narrative, which moves on to a deep dive into the film’s shoot ing on location at Smith College and on L.A. sound stages, with sharp accounts of Lehman and Nichols locked in a tense stand

so she could avoid the paparazzi. Nichols had her sport a babushka and “endeared” himself to her, matching the affection he’d already established with her handsome Welshman. As it happened, Nichols had also met Albee during his Broadway run with Elaine May. The men dined together one evening and enjoyed a real rapport. They both had an intellec tual turn of mind, were of the same generation, and shared a sense of being outsiders. Mike Nichols and his Jewish family were refugees from Nazi Germany; the seven-year-old Mike didn’t know a word of English on arriving in New York. An ear lier reaction to a childhood medication had resulted in an in ability to grow hair. He wore wigs throughout his life. Albee was estranged from a household that barely treated him as one of the family. According to Gefter, the two men “shared a sense of alienation and unhappiness about their respective student years at boarding schools.” Nichols claimed to feel “a real con nection ... and almost an affection” for Albee, whose “wry cor diality” he found appealing.

off over the screenplay or arguing about the demands of their privileged stars, who expected casual tributes in the form of flowers, champagne, and, for Elizabeth, jewelry. In the almost Oedipal stand-off between the sea soned Lehman and first-time movie director Nichols, the latter comes off as apprehensive, ambitious, and ma nipulative, the former as “level headed” and practical but sensitive to implied insults. Gefter has produced a page-turner of great charm that is also a caution ary tale to those with boundless per sonal ambition: Don’t suppose that you won’t make enemies or that your petty resentments won’t be noticed. His analyses of the book’s main and

Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966).

ancillary dramatis personæ testify to Gefter’s own social and psychological savvy, as when he stands back to editorialize: “Lehman and Nichols related to each other with a brand of slap stick that was not physical but classically neurotic, and typical of competitive New York Jewish men of that era. ... Nichols had a paradoxical awareness of his neurotic behavior, amused by it, on the one hand, yet, equally, unable to stop himself from being dick-ish.” With his earlier dual biography of Sam Wagstaff and Robert Mapplethorpe, followed by a biography of the era-defining pho tographer Richard Avedon, Gefter has now extended his repu tation for literary biography. In Cocktails with George and Martha , he’s given us a richly textured life history of an epic cultural touchstone.

Interestingly, Gefter doesn’t mention that this pair of urbane New Yorkers were both men of conflicted sexuality in a re pressive era. Although privately gay, Albee remained reticent on the subject in public, unwilling to risk being labeled and pi geonholed. Nichols, on the other hand, would go on to have four marriages and three children. Nevertheless, during his early years of fame he became a close friend to fashion photographer Richard Avedon. Gefter’s earlier biography of Avedon details how he and Nichols, who first met in 1959, established a life long friendship that for some time in the 1960s included a clan destine romance that was hiding in plain sight, given their public camaraderie. Gefter may have felt that such an inquiry was beyond the scope of the story he was telling. Yet Nichols and his difficult

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